Adm. William H. McRaven has been unanimously appointed by the University of Texas system’s Board of Regents to replace Francisco G. Cigarroa as chancellor of the 15-campus system. Admiral McRaven, who was set to retire in August as commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command and is known for planning the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, will start his new job on January 5. Dr. Cigarroa will return to the university’s Health Science Center at San Antonio, which he once led, to direct its pediatric transplant program.

Robert C. Orr, assistant secretary general for policy coordination and strategic planning at the United Nations for the past decade, will become dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland at College Park on October 13.

Lyn Chamberlin, who was vice president for external affairs at Vermont College of Fine Arts, will become vice president for marketing and communications at Sarah Lawrence College in mid-September.

Monica Kraft, a professor of medicine and chief of pulmonary, allergy, and critical-care medicine at Duke University, has been named chair of the department of medicine at the University of Arizona College of Medicine, in Tucson. She will begin in December.

Cornell B. LeSane II, who was associate director of admission at Carnegie Mellon University, is the new dean of admissions at Allegheny College.

Daniel J. Julius, who was executive director of the Levin Institute at the State University of New York, has become senior vice president and provost at New Jersey City University. He is an expert on collective bargaining in higher education.

Wendy L. Freedman, director of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in California, will become a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago this week. She will continue as chair of the Board of Directors of the Giant Magellan Telescope Project, a position she has held since the project began in 2003.

DEPARTURES

Arthur F. Kirk Jr. says he plans to retire as president of Saint Leo University, in Florida, after the 2014-15 academic year. During his tenure, which began in 1997, the institution changed its status from college to university.

C. Kevin Gillespie says he will step down at the end of his three-year term as president of Saint Joseph’s University, in Philadelphia, in June 2015. During his tenure, Father Gillespie has cut spending to deal with budget shortfalls.

Allyson Handley, president of the University of Maine at Augusta since 2008, is stepping down September 8 to become executive director of National University’s Sanford Education Center, which will educate nonprofit leaders and teachers.

DEATHS

John G. Sperling, a pioneer of for-profit and online higher education and founder of the University of Phoenix, the United States’ largest university by enrollment, died in California on August 22. He was 93. He had stepped down as chairman of the Apollo Education Group, the university’s parent company, just two years earlier. His son, Peter Sperling, now fills that post. Before the elder Mr. Sperling began the enterprise that made him a billionaire, he was a tenured professor of history at San Jose State University. The University of Phoenix, which got its start in the mid-1970s, served older students, in classrooms in many states. Eventually the vast majority of the university’s students were taking their courses online. Today the university has 242,000 students in bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs.

Stanley Reiter, a professor emeritus of managerial economics and decision sciences, economics, and mathematics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, died in Illinois on August 9. He was 89. Mr. Reiter retired in 2007 after having been a professor at Northwestern for 40 years. In 1971, Mr. Reiter founded Northwestern’s Center for Mathematical Studies in Economics and Management Science, which became known for its research in economic theory and operations research. He was a leader in applying mathematical methods to the study of operations.